April 6, 2007

End of Triumph

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
...
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of triumph.
—Jack Gilbert in his poem Failing and Flying

Source: Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac for Friday, April 6, 2007. The poem, Failing and Flying is included in Gilbert's book, Refusing Heaven.

WashingtonPost.com's Faces of the Fallen: ArmyU.S. Service members who died in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom